


Family Portrait, c. 1840, oil on canvas

by littlerhymes



Category: Interview With the Vampire (1994)
Genre: Domestic, Family, M/M, Missing Scene, Painting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 05:09:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2800718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlerhymes/pseuds/littlerhymes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestat's latest favourite is a painter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family Portrait, c. 1840, oil on canvas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadowkeeper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkeeper/gifts).



> Thank you to my beta-reader, SQ (proteinscollide)!
> 
> ETA: Thank you Merry for translating this into Chinese! Posted [here](http://www.mtslash.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=224655&page=1&extra=#pid4229304) and [here](http://caicc333.lofter.com/post/1d072135_e6e1c97). :)

Unlike Louis, who finds a stranger every night, Lestat and Claudia are more discerning. Claudia has her families, her doting matrons, her dollmakers; while Lestat has his aristocrats, his gilded youths, and his artists.

His latest favourite is a painter with liquid brown eyes, and a youthful fervour for beauty and truth. Lestat seeks him out each night, until the boy is madly in love with him and pliant to Lestat's every suggestion.

"A commission," Lestat says, when he visits the boy in his rooms - held in the painter's name, but paid from Lestat's pocket. "A family portrait. It will be my honour to contribute to a talent as rare as yours."

"Oh no, monsieur," the boy says, stammering and giddy-drunk, "the honour will be all mine." He flushes prettily when Lestat pulls open his shirt at the neck. "Monsieur," he says, gasping beneath Lestat's mouth, "oh…"

Lestat drinks lightly that night, sealing the cut on the boy's neck with a few droplets of blood before sending him to sleep with only a few dim, wine-stained memories. He'll need to keep up his strength.

The next night, the sittings begin.

Claudia is curious about Lestat's painter. Her drawing master passed away from a 'fever' some months before, but his lessons seem to have struck some chord. Lestat has watched her sketching for hours, with the same still intensity she brings to the hunt, heedless of the charcoal staining her white hands and velvet skirts. 

"I could watch him, learn from him," she says now. "If he is as good as you say, of course."

"Better," Lestat boasts. He catches her by the wrist as she turns to go. "But do recall, my dear, that he's mine." 

Louis requires more persuasion. "What are you up to, Lestat?" he says, laying down his comb at the dresser where he sits, his hair falling loose about his shoulders. "What's your plan for this boy?"

"Must I have a plan? You're always so suspicious, Louis!" Lestat exclaims, exasperated. But he forces himself to soften his tone, to lower his voice. He sits on the edge of the table and takes Louis' hand, fingers stroking lines against Louis' palm and smiling his most guileless smile. "Come, Louis. Finish getting dressed. I want to see you and Claudia in your finest."

Louis sighs and looks aside, lashes dark against his cheek. But he doesn't say no, and when he pulls his hand away it's only to begin buttoning up his shirt. 

Lestat's waiting at the foot of the staircase when they come down, hand in hand: Louis sombre in emerald and ebony, and Claudia in cornflower blue, hair bright as gold. Lestat hands Claudia into the waiting carriage with an exaggerated bow, and tries to do the same for Louis, before he's brushed aside. Laughing, Lestat follows him into the carriage and shuts the door.

They fed earlier in the night, so the painter sees nothing amiss in their rosy cheeks and their red lips. The boy bows deeply as Lestat introduces his 'cousin' and his cousin's daughter, and leads them into the studio. He directs them to their places and arranges them just so, his ears colouring slightly as he dares to smooth down the lapels of Louis' coat, to bring forward the mass of curls over Claudia's shoulder. 

He flushes deepest of all when he turns to Lestat, who playfully, deliberately lets his limbs go still and heavy. The painter tugging at his ill-positioned hand might as well be trying to fold stone or dam the Mississippi with a feather. Reading the surface of his thoughts, Lestat senses faint confusion, edging into the beginning of alarm...

"Lestat," Louis says, softly, a warning.

Lestat laughs. But he moves his hand.

They come back for several nights in a row, and then once or twice each week, taking care to feed before each sitting. Soon the boy forgets to blush when he touches them; indeed, when absorbed in his work, he forgets almost everything. If they were mortal, they'd complain or fret or beg for rest. But since they are not, they do not, and instead sit for hours on hours without a word, a blink, a breath. The painter barely notices, and stroke by stroke the colours on the canvas grow thick through all the long slow nights of the summer.

Lestat visits frequently, sometimes with Claudia by his side. She watches silently while they talk - or at least Lestat talks - her eyes steady on the painter's darting eyes and the motion of his hands, only very occasionally breaking in to ask a question in her clear, unchildlike voice. 

At home, the parlour begins to fill with canvases and paint; she spends as much time at her miniature easel as she does with her dolls, sometimes to the very verge of daybreak. And just as she does with her dolls, on each tiny canvas she creates an eerie tableau - almost always women and girls. One shows a girl lying on a settee in a darkened room, eyes shut. In another two women lean intimately close at a crowded soiree, the painted fan concealing what might be a whisper.

In the time it takes Claudia to complete a dozen such works, the painter finishes only one. 

The boy's all eagerness when he unveils the finished portrait for Lestat, his eyes wide as he watches for a reaction. "Does it please you, monsieur?" he says at last, wringing his hands and searching Lestat's face for a sign - any sign. When Lestat makes no reply, the boy ventures to place his hand on Lestat's arm.

Lestat wrenches his attention away from the painting and draws the boy close. "My dear, it's quite perfect," he says, and as the boy stammers out his thanks Lestat says nothing at all. 

The boy is indeed talented. One day he might even be a great artist. Then again, Lestat thinks, he could be dead by morning. Perhaps even sooner.

Step by step, he backs the boy up against the wall, caging him against the patterned paper. He brushes his mouth against the boy's ear and feels a shiver reverberate through his whole body, hears his heart beating faster and faster. Lestat places his hand around the boy's throat and that's enough to send his eyes sliding half-shut, his head tilting back to reveal the web of silvery scars on his throat where Lestat has fed, and fed, and fed.

The boy lets out a little cry when Lestat's teeth sink through his skin. He tastes just as sweet as he did the first time. 

Claudia is away when he returns to the house with the painting in tow, but Louis is in the parlour with his books. He watches in silent disapproval as Lestat props the painting up on the mantelpiece, just below the space where he plans for it to eventually hang.

"Well?" Lestat demands as he stands back to admire it. "Don't you like your painting, Louis?"

" _My_ painting?" From behind him, he hears Louis' book close with a snap. "This was your idea. I told you I wanted nothing to do with this game of yours."

"Game? This is art, Louis! I thought you were a connoisseur," he says, mocking, looking over his shoulder. Lestat clicks his tongue. "Come now. At the very least you can't deny his skill, can you?"

Louis sets his book aside and stands, hands folded behind his back, gazing upwards.

The portrait shows Louis seated with Claudia standing beside him, while Lestat rests his hand on the back of Louis' chair. The painter has captured their likenesses well, and the colours almost burst out of the frame: her golden curls, his green eyes, and Lestat's too-wide white-toothed smile. The brushstrokes emulate the smoothness of silks and satins, and their eyes shine with the bright lustre of jewels. It is, by any standard, an accomplishment.

"I don't deny it," Louis says at last. He shrugs. "But that's surely beside the point, isn't it? Don't ask for my approval now, Lestat. You've never needed it before." 

"You have it backwards, Louis," Lestat says. He tries charm, attempting to tamp down the displeasure that's threatening to sour his good mood. "This is my gift to you. Now, what is it that we always tell Claudia? That it's good manners to say 'thank you'?"

Louis frowns. "A gift?"

"A testament," Lestat says, "to everything we've done." He sweeps his arm to include not only the painting, but their home and everything in it; and the city that lies beyond the window, teeming with light and seething life, a cup brimming full and ready to be tasted. 

But Louis only turns aside. "You didn't do this for me," he says. "You may tell yourself that it is, but it's not for me."

"So," Lestat says, "no 'thank you', then?" 

He looks at the portrait again, trying to see it through Louis' eyes. Does it seem like a memorial to all he's lost rather than gained, the lives he's taken rather than the one he's living? Or perhaps it's too close to parody, this portrait of cosy familial bliss, three in a row all smiling through their pointed teeth.

Lestat shakes his head and reaches for the frame. "Ah, well. Since it doesn't please you..."

Louis moves quickly, faster than any mortal ever could, before he can dash it to the floor. "Don't," Louis says simply, fingers closing around Lestat's wrist. "Please don't."

"But I thought you didn't want it, Louis," Lestat says, grinning, triumphant. As if he'd ever had any real intention of destroying it.

Louis sighs and takes the painting out of Lestat's hands. He props it up on the mantelpiece a care that belies his indifference. "Would you have that boy of yours die for nothing? Let this work of his stand, at least for a little while longer."

It takes him a moment to realise what Louis means. "Quick to assume I killed him, aren't you?"

"Why shouldn't I assume it?" Louis says, returning to his seat and his book. "He was perfect for you. At the height of his passion, at the peak of his youth. His life had barely begun. Isn't that how you like them? Plucked before their innocence can fade?" 

For a moment Lestat stands very still. Always, always, Louis returns to this - Lestat, all teeth and claws, snatching little girls and young men in the night to turn them into monsters themselves. 

"So full of compassion, aren't you, Louis?" He snatches the book from Louis' hand and tosses it aside. "But don't you dare pretend that you wouldn't have taken him yourself if you'd seen him in a darkened street. You'd have struck him down without a word, without a thought, in your blind hunger. I gave him the chance to create something beautiful. _You_ would have killed him a dozen times over, and yet here you stand, judging _me_?" 

Without any effort at all, his voice has risen and he's leaning over Louis and snarling like some caged wolf, spoiling for the fight that Louis is usually all too willing to give him. 

Louis reaches out - to shove him, Lestat thinks, to push him aside as he snaps out some sharp retort. Which will be his cue to fling Louis' hand away, or laugh in his face. Or perhaps stalk out of the room and find a sailor by the docks or a handsome boy in a crowded ballroom, someone with black hair and eyes that could be green in the dark, and drink him down to a husk.

Instead Louis' hand comes to rest on Lestat's cheek, and it seems they will take the other path tonight. "You want me to say you're right," Louis says, but gently.

"Of course I'm right," Lestat says, though it's hard to keep the sneer in his voice when Louis is like this, soft-spoken and wide-eyed, thumb rubbing small circles along his jaw. "Just admit it, Louis."

"No," Louis says, "you're wrong," leaning forward to press a kiss on his mouth. 

For a moment Lestat doesn't move - and then he's kissing back fiercely, pressing Louis back into the leather seat. As easily as that, the fight is over, and some green-eyed sailor somewhere is granted one more night's reprieve.

When Claudia returns, her slippered feet making almost no sound at all on the carpeted stairs, he is lying on the settee with his head in Louis' lap. Louis reads, holding the book with one hand and with the other combing his fingers through Lestat's hair. Each stroke sends prickles of sensation through his scalp, tiny little shivers of pleasure.

"If you could only purr," she says to Lestat in a undertone. He swipes at a ribbon on her skirt as she passes but she sidesteps him easily. "So it is done," she says, looking up at the painting on the mantelpiece as she unties her bonnet and places it on a chair. 

"You sound surprised," Louis says, closing the book.

She shrugs. "I passed the boy's studio tonight and saw him working. I'd assumed that once the painting was complete that Lestat would-"

"So did I," Louis says, looking down at Lestat in astonishment.

"I never said I'd killed him," Lestat says, somewhat testily, as he sits up. "I'm not such a fool - I've been seen coming and going from his rooms near every night for the past three months. Did you truly think I'd risk all for _him_?"

"Well..." begins Louis. 

"Yes," Claudia says. 

Irritated, Lestat waves away their comments as Claudia clambers up on the settee beside Louis, clinging to his side like a little girl. All three lapse into silence as they consider the portrait.

"He captured us well," Claudia says, as serious as any critic, "and the details are very fine."

"Very fine," Louis says, peaceably enough. 

"In a way we are like paintings, are we not?" Claudia says after a moment, tilting her head consideringly. "Mortals may age and die, but we will always be like _them_ ," she says, nodding to the figures in the frame. "Isn't that so, Lestat?"

"Quite, my dear," Lestat says, with a sincerity he does not entirely feel. 

For what he knows and they do not is that their triumvirate, their family of hunters, has already lasted far longer than they had any right to expect. In the years since he sailed from the old world, coven after coven will have formed, to burn briefly before falling apart - only to rise anew in different form, in new configurations. Such has been the way ever since their kind first came into existence. Yet here in New Orleans he and his beautiful ones have remained suspended in glass, heedless of the turning of the seasons. 

Still, the ticking of the clock cannot be silenced forever. It's not age that wearies their kind, but time itself, the dimension that the painting cannot capture. 

Lestat is by nature disinclined to melancholy but at times he has thought to himself, _this cannot last, it will not last_ ; and more recently, _when it is over, I will want to remember..._ And so his steps had led him at last down to the artist's quarter, to a dark-eyed boy who burned with untapped talent, who could create the work that Lestat desired. 

In time the painter will die, tomorrow or the next year or in the fulness of old age; and Lestat's children will one day leave him or maybe he'll even let them go. But this one thing, with some luck, could outlast them all.

Meanwhile Claudia looks at him enquiringly, and Louis squeezes his hand, and Lestat comes back to the present. "Come!" he says, rising to his feet, pulling Louis and Claudia up with him. "Let's have music. I want music, and people, and dancing! We have time before the dawn, my loves, and the city is waiting."

For the moment will not stay forever - he'd best enjoy it while it lasts.


End file.
